Trainer Lineups

One of the most important parts of the game is, of course, the trainer battles.
Honestly, this should be one of the funnest parts of the project. We need trainer types (Bug Catcher, Hiker, etc.), trainer names (feel free to name them after people you know), reward for winning, and a list of their pokemon with level, moves, abilities, and items.

The ones neccessary for the demo are Routes 201-204, Froy's gym trainers, Therma's gym trainers, and Chartree Forest, so lets start there, finalize the list, and move on to the next set.

I think you're right about Chartree. There should probably be about 7-8 encounters there but instead there's a whopping 13. I think the concern was that it was better for trainers to be overleveled for Froy than for people to fall flat to Therma and be forced to grind levels on wild Pokemon to beat her. Perhaps if some of the trainers can be refought after you defeat Froy?

Added Froy and Therma, so that we'd have a reference for how much higher the player's level needs to get. They're labeled as finalized, but I'm sure we could tweak a couple things if it seems unrealistic.

1st line: Internal name of the trainer's type. Just assume it's whatever it's named ALLCAPS and no spaces. I'll correct it when I add it in.
2nd line: Trainer's name. If they are a trainer that will rematch or are a Orion Grunt or Rocket Grunt, add a comma and a number from 0-255 increasing
3rd line: Separated by comma: # of Pokemon, An item (like those full restores the E4 have, they'll use them automatically when necessary), another item, another item, another item (ignore commas for non-existent values)
4th+ line: These are the Pokemon the trainer has, 1 pokemon to a line, aspects separated by comma: SPECIES,LEVEL,HELDITEM,MOVE1,MOVE2,MOVE3,MOVE4,ABI LITY(0 for first ability, 1 for second),GENDER(0 male, 1 female),FORM(for Pokemon who have them),FALSE(Shinyness),NATURE,10(IVs, 10 is default),70(Happiness, 0 for Rockets, 255 for Orions),NICKNAME(if applicable),FALSE(Shadowness)
NOTES: For the 4th+ line you can leave certain elements blank (like Held Item and such). If you leave all moves blank then that Pokemon will have default wild ones. If you have any moves filled the Pokemon will have ONLY those moves. Ability, Gender: leave these blank for the most part, they will be determined naturally via trainer Personal ID (ie semi RNG). Exceptions are: Gym Leaders, E4, gender-specific trainers (ie Ladies and Lasses can have all female Pokemon). You can buff up the IVs of certain Pokemon for rival/E4/gym leaders for more challenge. However, that number is used for every IV (so if you have 31 the Pokemon will have +31 in all stats).

I will do Chartree Forest. Everything else is fair game for anyone else. This is pretty darn important, so I'm expecting some help on this at least.

Did you check to see whether each of the planned abilities were the first of the Pokemon's? You can check in the pokemon.txt topic. In any case, I ran a check and the values for ABILITY for Growlithe and Scorchion should be 1. Also, you can leave the gender value blank unless you really want them all to be male for some reason. One more thing, instead of LEADER the trainer type should be LEADER_Froy so that you get the Froy sprite when you fight him. Otherwise, good work!

Hey, I was looking up the abilities like you said, and, it turns out that Therma's Equill has an ability that it's line cannot have. I checked both Pokemon.txt AND it's dex entry, and Empty Head is not an ability that Equill can have! What should it be changed to?

I basically have no plans for the rest of the summer, so I hope to focus on my Topaz-ing and writing.

EDIT: Realized that there was no field for reward. How's that going to work? Is it automatic?
(never mind, found out that it is determined in trainertypes.txt, so reward is related to trainer type and is not set on a case by case basis)

EDIT2:Looking at the lineups, the ones I listed for 204 might actually be Froy's gym. What do you think?

It may require more looking into, because the Essential's wiki has a category for money, experience and prizes, but it's incomplete and red. I have a feeling it's a matter of just scripting "You got ___P from the Trainer!" and then using a script to simply add P to your character. But that is a little cumbersome. Also, for future reference, the only items trainers have been programmed to know how to use is basic Potions, stat Heal effects and "X" items. SO just use those. I'm not sure if Full Restore counts so we'll have to test and see.

Took another look at these lineups, and I realized that Birdkeeper Clark has higher level pokemon than Gym Leader Therma. Is that right? I think it might be harder to beat Lass Violet than Therma. Should we raise Therma's levels/lower her gym trainer's levels?

Also, in response to IB's last post:

Every trainer in the game, including the player, has a trainer type. The trainer type determines the trainer's appearance, title (e.g. Bug Catcher, Hiker, Gym Leader), the amount of money gained from defeating them, and associated battle music.

Oh cool. That saves us a bunch of work then since the numbers will work themselves out automatically.

I think the reason why the trainer had higher level Pokemon than Therma's was because we realized that the player would be essentially be battling Therma straight after Froy and adjusted her levels down to compensate. We can raise them now that we have additional encounters in Chartree. Does anyone think that fighting their way back through Chartree again might be a little boring for players though? What can we do to spice up the experience, and perhaps we should have fewer repeat trainers?

Well, we have 2 plot-related battles on the way back. Perhaps we could add a first sidequest here? And/or have one of the professor's aides fight you? "Professor Willow sent me here to test your skill!" and stuff like that.

Thunder's too early, Thunderbolt might work, Shock Wave too. How about a rock move? Rock Tomb? It's given out by Brock and Roxanne so it's not too early (like Thunder).
Or Sonicboom? :P It'd make for easy kills for leveling up (if you want to power level in the demo). Of course we could always change it to a sidequest AFTER the Demo, so people who go to him/her for the TM end up on a totally epic sidequest instead without any idea as to what they were getting into.

Here's the first run of Chartree. I'm thinking of only adding 3 on the way back (shortcut way blocked by Rockets initially) since there's 3 more battles, one of which is double for Orion/Rocket. One thing that needs addressing though is the possibility of Bradley teaming up with you for the double battle. It's in the script but I can't seem to find out how to do it.

Partner trainers!
They appear to be defined in the same way as normal trainers, with a trainer type (in this case something new like "BRADLEY", since Bradley is unique), and a an individual trainer profile thing (like what we're building now). Then all we need to do is have an event register him

Code:

pbRegisterPartner(PBTrainers::BRADLEY,"Bradley",0)

and unregister him once you win or are defeated

Code:

pbDeregisterPartner

There would also need to be an if statement in the event, to check which version of Bradley to use (depends on the starter).

I think there's also a bunch of "if statements" we can use to determine which starter he has depending on which one you chose that is used for rivals in general. Thanks Cyndadile I didn't even know to look for Partner Trainers.

May I bring up an issue. Currently there are 17 trainers before Froy + a couple of rival battles. In FRLG there are 5 trainers before Brock. In addition Brock's pokemon are a couple of levels higher than Froy's. Therefore the player will be significantly overleveled. Either the number of trainers needs to be reduced (to less than ten) or Froy's pokemon need an upgrade (of at least 5 levels).

However reducing the amount of trainers maybe tough when there are 3/4 routes and a forest to navigate through. Increasing Froy's levels is also not a good idea for obvious reasons. I suggest we forget about trainers on 202 and only have a couple on 203. Then we can reduce the number in Chartree to around 6/7. On 204 it might be appropriate to have trainers only accessable on the way back, in order to increase for Therma.

Also, I'm not sure if this is an issue or not buut here it goes. Due to having twelve gyms and a huge region, the player's pokemon will have levelled significantly throughout the game. They should be approaching lvl 100 by after the elite 4. However levels of evolution havent been adjusted. This means that the majority of the game will be played with all the player's pokemon in their final form. Also this will be represented in the wild, as although the pokemon maybe in their lowest form, they are likely to be levelled higher than their evolution level and thus may miss out on some key moves. I'm not sure if people deem this an issue, but i thought it should be noted.

If we remove trainers on Route 202, then we have two entire routes without any real battles. That isn't really a great way to start a game. If anything, we want to leave them on 202 and remove them from 203. However, we may not need to do anything so dramatic: I remember great frustration trying to beat that stupid Onix with Pikachu or Charmander. Brock was actually one of the hardest gym leaders for me!

On to the second issue...
The 12th gym leader has pokemon in the low 70s. In order to get that high, I'll probably have to run through a load of tall grass. Usually, I can (barely) manage the gyms through a combination of facing every trainer on the way, a lot of revives, and pure dumb luck. That's my pokemon strategy. I don't think Caldera/Kirant are that much larger than Hoenn (but I could be wrong). So, it's reasonable to assume that, if I were to use my usual strategy, I'd start to fail somewhere around leader 6 (I usually get to the E4 with levels in the low to mid 40s). I think we may need to decrease gym leader levels. A lot of the gym leaders won't have more than a short route separating them from somewhere you've already been, and it's difficult to fit a bunch of trainers there. So, I think that "approaching 100" may be a huge overestimation.
There's also an advantage to pokemon who could have evolved; they get better moves faster.

These issues are really things that needs to be playtested to make an accurate prediction. Once the demo is released, we'll be able to get feedback about what needs to be changed to improve the game. After that, I guess we'll need some sort of alpha/beta testing system and adjust according to that.

Level 100 takes a long, long while to get to, involving loads of E4 grinding generally. I understand the sentiment though I think that numbers in the 70s are actually more likely (given that I got through my first run of FRLG with levels 36-40 things!) I think you may be right about the number of trainers, and this will probably become apparent when placing the trainers on the maps. Reducing the number of trainers a bit might be helpful, though another solution is raising Froy's level but keeping Therma's only slightly higher than his, since there aren't too many battles between them. As for Brock, I think I basically fought to Mt. Moon before facing him...

Based on Cranewing gym's current design, I think we should have at least 2 trainers there. Also, ther seems to be quite a gap between the levels in Chartree and the levels in the gym. Could we raise some of the chartree trainer levels a little?

How about moving increasing the levels of the last trainer in Chartree by 1 ... Remember that this is effectively 5 trainers in a row, whereas before the gym trainer the player's pokemon will be fully healed.